This is Foggy Ruins of TIme, a feature that provides the cultural context behind certain comic book characters/behaviors. You know, the sort of then-topical references that have faded into the “foggy ruins of time.” To wit, twenty years from now, a college senior watching episodes of "Seinfeld" will likely miss a lot of the then-topical pop culture humor (like the very specific references in “The Understudy” to the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding scandal).

Today, we look at how the X-Men essentially just adopted a real life jet and the jet has now become more famous as being the X-Men's fictional plane than being a real life marvel of aerospace engineering.

When the X-Men first had their own specialized jet in X-Men #20, it didn't really seem to be BASED on anything in particular...

Even when Dave Cockrum came aboard with Giant-Size X-Men #1, he just kept the most recent jet that they were using, a Strato-Jet that was mostly fictional...

Okay, now in the early 1960s, Lockheed Martin was developing planes that could avoid enemy radar, do surveillance and fly faster than any other plane ever could.

Their first plane like this, the A-12, came out in 1962...

However, this was just a single-seater. So in 1964, working at insane levels of design and production speed, they debuted the Blackbird SR-71, which seated two people (one person to fly and the other to work the reconnaisance tools)...

A couple of interesting points about the name - it was supposed to be RS-71, but President Lyndon B. Johnson mixed the name up and they changed the name so as to not make the president look bad. Secondly, while it entered popular culture as the Blackbird, the flight crews for the plane called it Habu, which is the name of a snake.

So, how did it translate into comic book form?

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In X-Men #94, Chris Claremont's first issue as the scripter of the series, the X-Men finally get their Blackbird, with the comic specifically noting that it is an adapted SR-71...

After it was destroyed, its partner was introduced in X-Men #104...

Here's the fascinating thing about the introduction of the Blackbird. Chris Claremont is famous for his love of planes (his mother was a pilot). John Byrne once joked that it drove him nuts how Claremont kept naming everything that he could after airplanes (like, later on, Lockheed the dragon). However, since X-Men #94 was plotted by Len Wein, I imagine that that means that Dave Cockrum decided to use the Blackbird as the visual inspiration for the X-Men's new jet even without Claremont's influence. Or perhaps Claremont was involved somehow anyways?

Claremont's love of planes was evident with the use of a De Havilland DH 98 Mosquito...

as the plane that the Summers were flying in X-Men #144 when Scott and Alex Summers were separated from their parents (as their parents were abducted by aliens).

How does the actual Blackbird compare against the most common, earlier version of the Blackbird (before they got Shi'ar technology involved and the plane began to be able to fly into outer space and have a tractor beam and stuff like that). Well, the most notable difference is that the X-Men's jet carried a whole lot more people, but one less famous difference is that the Blackbird did NOT have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capabilities. Lockheed Martin's current plane, F-35 Lightning II , does, but not the Blackbird SR-71.

The real life Blackbird was retired after over 30 years of service in 1998 and 1999. The X-Men's Blackbird had not even yet appeared in a single X-Men film! It has appeared in a number of X-Men films since, which is part of it now being more famous as being a fictional plane than it was as a real life plane (although, it WAS a pretty darn famous plane in real life).

Okay, that's it for this installment! If anyone else has a suggestion for a future edition of Foggy Ruins of Time, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!